Red Steel 2 Dev Says Motion Controls Must Become Standard

The Wii might be the biggest selling console of this generation, but Ubisoft Creative Director, Jason Vandenberghe, says that until motion controls become universal, core gamers are still going to dismiss them.

Core gamers often seem to have a very low opinion of motion controls, dismissing them as a gimmick used only in casual games. Jason Vandenberghe believes this attitude won't go away unless every console is motion controlled, and thinks that until that happens, hardcore games that use motion controls will be largely overlooked.

VandenBerghe leads Ubisoft's Paris studio, which made Red Steel 2, and says that just getting people used to the motion controls was an enormous challenge. He said that motion controls have removed many of the barriers imposed by traditional controllers, but this new freedom creates as many problems as it solves. He referred to the testing phase of the game as "absolute random chaos," saying that people would actually drop the controller in disgust when they couldn't perform the actions the game required of them. The solution, he said, was to teach the motions more like you might teach something like karate or dance, rather than a normal videogame tutorial.

But VandenBerghe says that the best tutorials in the world won't make a bit of difference if the audience doesn't want to go along with it. He said that of all the problems that had plagued Red Steel 2, one of the biggest was that the majority of people were unwilling to engage in physical activity to play a videogame. He estimated that perhaps one person in five was willing to exert themselves, and thought that even that was probably optimistic.

He says that the only way that this number is going to increase is by motion controls becoming the standard. He says that being restricted to a single platform and requiring an additional hardware purchase kept Red Steel 2 from selling to its full potential, and as long as motion controls remain an add-on, they would always be a niche product.